I don't think android would have been the way for Nokia, i think they forsaw quite rightly that Samsung or another asian large company would run away and become the majority android player, Could have easily been LG and to a lesser degree HTC, however as we've seen it's Samsung.

The problem was that Nokia would have been a newbie in the android arena with the others being entrenched already in android.

Personally i think it was a wise decision, Android will never be fluid/smooth due to the java overhead. I owned a Note2 and it appeared nice and fluid but it would stutter, it would slow down here and there, the experience was very uneven. Sometimes text messages would take a good 10 seconds to open. Personally this is how my experience of android has been for the past 7 months. Great ideas, excellent control over the device, i.e. i could change anything i wanted, however the core experience, the core applications were buggy, the experience inconsistent and mostly slow.

To me it seemed that android sacrifices performance, less bugs to get the latest and greatest out there, we need to add feature xyz out there at the sacifice of speed/stability.

An example of a bug so obvious and so stupid that i can't believe it was ever allowed through let alone has been reported and yet to be fixed to this day. When you plug in headphones to listen to music with the phone not on silent, all message/sms/email/ringing sounds will still go through the phones speaker. The most obvious action is that the sounds go through the headphones.'

As for their choice, i don't know enough about symbian to know if it had a future, im not sure if Nokia alone could have built an app ecosystem large enough to entice big service providers like FB, Twitter, Instagram, which may not be my/your cup of tea, but is expected from the general population (someone can correct me if they had these apps).

Meego looked great but the release date seemed to be constantly pushed back and again would nokia perhaps with some others been enough to push the ecosystem?

Generally smartphone today need a few services (ecosystem) to survive. They need an app store, music store (video is a plus), Sync/photo sharing store and good integration either through apps or through the OS to mainstream services like Facebook, twitter etc.. Again i don't know enough about the alternatives, but i do know that Microsoft could offer this to nokia with the Windows + Xbox platform.